Spaceships and Simulations

Battletech: Scouring Sands is the first offering in the Aces series from Catalyst, allowing you to play Battletech by yourself.

This is a Pyrrhic victory for sure, in that I would rather have more people to play with, but this promises the opportunity for co-op play, as well as solo.

The Aces system uses Alpha Strike, the simplified version of Battletech (CBT, for “Classic Battletech” to distinguish it from Alpha Strike and Clix and video games, I suppose).

Alpha Strike and CBT are one of those X-Com/XCOM things where each is great and has its role in offering different ‘flavors’ of game, with some partisans for either that consider the other ruinous. And if you do like Alpha Strike the nice thing here is that the box contains enough to justify the purchase on its own, with additional terrain, markers, and a set of new(ish) miniatures for painting.

I am optimistic about Aces as a solo play system. It works so far, but I can tell this is something that I need a lot more play for a final opinion. How hackable is it? All systems are hackable, but at what point do I feel like I can predict it? Only the new decks as they come out will te..

Where I don’t think it works is in the promise of co-op. CBT runs pretty slow for a skirmish game. Alpha Strike runs pretty fast. Each of the cards has you working through a flowchart to figure out what moves an AI controlled entity takes, where each step is meant to produce fewer and fewer options until there is only one. This means surveying all the possible options that fit within the rules, and narrowing them down, line by line. This makes things slower. Not unreasonably so, and it’s still overall faster than CBT, but it is slower.

In theory, co-op should be many hands make light work. In practice, this means talking through every step with someone else, and working through whatever disagreements or interpretations need to be made. It may produce better gameplay in the sense that the best move might be missed by one player that is caught by two, but unless you two (or three etc) are pair bonded, there is a lot of talking. (There is also the element of 2+ people not having the same commitment to difficulty, or ‘why I stopped playing Arkham Horror.’)

The other point made clear is, with how fuzzy things like the set up systems are, and how much interpretation can go into a measurement of something, the idea of tournament-level Alpha Strike is bonkers.

The campaign is set in the ilKhan era, the “current” era for the Battletech setting. This is the right decision, but thanks, I hate it. Unlike that other game, Battletech is easygoing about miniatures, but the miniatures have focused on earlier eras. This is less of a problem in a practical sense: in-universe, mech designs are constantly updated and versions of old mechs are always in play. But there are so many – so many – more mech designs and toybox equipment that come out in the 100+ years of in-universe time between the last boxed set and this boxed set. It’s giving players a much bigger sandbox; sand not included.

As someone who likes the lore, this decision is frustrating in the sense that I have much less of a sense of how to build out my forces to fit within the story line.

I think it is odd as a business decision. I suspect that the old fans, in either sense of the word, are likely to already have the groups to play with, and thus the allure of something like Aces is smaller. Newly added fans are more prone to be looking for this, who are not going to understand the context or all the technology. It is the right choice, moving forward rather than looking backwards, but I also think that Catalyst needs to get decks and adventures out post haste for earlier eras that have been covered.

I have not gotten far into the campaign. It has a choose your own adventure structure with different sort so messages and keywords triggering different things. Something that can be ported and developed by both the company and the fans for different eras and similar. But let us talk about the start of the campaign, and how it relates to the blog here:

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The starting mission of the campaign is stylized as a training session before the events proper set off, meant to assess your skills and get you used to the sorts of things that you can expect to see. I think that it did its job (though let’s see in the adventure itself). However, events in the training session did not transpire the way that I expect them to, not quite.

I hesitate to go all fan fiction here, though I reserve the right to threaten you with that in the future. The highlight of the game was not a killer die roll but a wild maneuver, where a Wasp rushed past a Mad Cat, only to then take a sharp turn around a building to avoid a Nova’s crosshairs, ducking back up against the wall of the building and revealing the hidden objective marker there, which amounted “hey, there’s a trap coming” (the trap had already been sprung that turn).

The cinematic here are something else. Starting with the scene from the Mad Cat’s cockpit with Clan Jade Falcon warrior not comprehending the zippy little Inner Sphere Robotech-y SOB running within arms’ reach as they plod at an already good clip down an alleyway; the PPC shots going wild as the Mad Cat reacts impulsively and within minimum range, the blasts peppering the nearby building; hearing targeting alarms in the Wasp cockpit with the mechwarrior going from thinking that it’s the Mad Cat behind, only to look up and see a Nova atop the building across the way looking down; for the Wasp to take a double turn, risking its back armor to that second more powerful mech, as the Wasp ducks behind a building, and concluding with the mechwarrior saying ‘commander, I think that these guys might be ready for us!’

Okay, so maybe a little fan fiction.

The question is how cartoon to play it. The Wasp running under the legs of the Mad Cat is too much, but the sort of feet-out, skidding u-turn, like a character avoiding falling off a cliff, is almost reasonable.

…except that this was not what I was thinking about when I went in. One of the principles of The Sicko Manifesto is that Rules are Improv, that rules act like the audience prompts for you to play off of. There is, much like in improv, great discretion in how you interpret those prompts, which ones to follow or disregard, but you are receiving the story, or interpolating it from a set of results. You are not creating the story, or imposing your own story. It is not right or wrong, but it is where I find the fun.

The set up for the Scouring Sands campaign is that the opposition is a remnant of a remnant of a remnant. While the ingratiation I so far have is limited to the initial fiction, a discarded warrior from a past its prime Clan on a no-name planet commanding a unit of folks sent there to die. So it is fun to think about the natural opposition to that being the “Not So Different” version, a Clan warrior in a similar circumstance, equally old, equally thrown off, also here for a last-call fight to die in, but fundamentally forward looking. Similar situation. Same values. Different application.

And then the no-named character in the plucky scout mech, with half of the rest of their lance in flight, does something outrageous by virtue of just being fast, with no functional advance to the sortie, not even finding the right objective, but getting MVP out of the moral victory, as if spooking the opposition.¹ That leads to a different narrative, the concert where the opener steals the show. The guy hired to make numbers for the training exercise leaves the bosses wondering “why don’t we just hire that guy? Probably a lot cheaper.” And that build is of a different sort of force entirely, one made of equal nobodies, scraped up together, all speed and strike and high risk frustration tactics, rather than moral blaze of glory.

I ought to be able to combine these two. There is enough purchasing power for a pair of lances, one under each design, and hypothetically, the ideas work in tandem pretty well. But I am struggling to manage the company build that manages that – it doesn’t feel right – and I can already see the sort of doctrinal struggles coming out in terms of the mission choices from the outset.

In terms of philosophy though, this is what I mean when I talk about simulation. I can do whatever I want. I am in control of the fiction. I don’t even have to have fiction. But I enjoy myself more when I treat it as if what is happening is what I am being given, and I am seeing the process play out for me in some satisfying way.

1. There’s a followup to this that is just as good that I’m not going to explain for time, but the Wasp then passes the ball in a way that sets up the conclusion to things, as opposed to trying for the immediate win, in a move that was equally satisfying to have happen because it was not obvious to take. ↩︎